In recent years, the necessity of reducing the amount of paper consumption is increasing in order to reduce environmental burdens and to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions. For this reason, image forming apparatuses are known which can reuse a sheet by forming an image on the sheet using an erasable recording material and then erasing the image by adding heat and light to the sheet on which the image has been once formed.
In addition, apparatuses are known which count the number of passages of the sheet which has passed through an erasing device, at the time of erasing the image which has been formed using the erasable recording material like this with an erasing device, and inhibit the reuse of the sheet with more than a prescribed number of passages because of causing a jam.
However, though by combining the image forming apparatus and the erasing device like these, to reuse the papers can be implemented, and concurrently the generation of jams due the damage of the sheet that is the physical stress applied to the sheets, such as folds and rucks can be reduced, a problem still remains that the printing quality degrades by printing the image on the partially degraded sheet.